The Beginning
by JestaAriadne
Summary: In a bathtub? Reflecting on her love life? Seriously? Yes. Only don't call it a love life, like it's simple, like it's something distinct from the rest. I don't know what I feel.


**notes:** Another one for a female character week. The given theme was actually _memories_ and I sure doubled down on that :D Mmm, it's stylistically… something or other. I feel like it's both very me and like nothing I've written before, and rather mundane but rather odd.

It's not actually really about the ship or any love story aspect at all so much...

Set in 1993.

* * *

What you must on no account do is begin with your protagonist in a bathtub, and yet here we are.

At any rate don't linger on her physical description. Eyes: brown; hair: brown. Slim enough and straight as a board up and down to her hips which are anything but boyish. Unremarkable and indeed un-remarked-on further—it's not that sort of story. And she's a modern, modest girl who doesn't, often, make awkward insistences that her body be recognised as having anything to do with her identity or her troubles. Don't worry. This one isn't _that_ sort of story either.

See, the action of the bathtub story is precisely nothing. A young woman in her bath: a metaphor, perhaps, of cleansing, of fresh starts. Maybe even of baptism, only let's not involve something as gauche as Christianity. (A velvet divorce, a bubbly revolution—that's all she wanted.)

A young woman in her bath, left to her thoughts and memories, and at one point she hears a noise from somewhere else in the building that startles her, but she makes no other reaction. The stakes are not high. She does not get out of the bath until after the story ends.

* * *

To get to the point: _well, Czechia, and do you love him_? Cherchez l'homme in the case! isn't the romance angle why we're all here?

That's not a question. Not something you can ask. Not something you can answer. As well ask it of one of a pair of climbing roses trained to the same wire trellis, _and did you ever love him_?

Maybe you could, now and only now. You don't have to.

Trouble is, you can read absolutely _any_ life, the more dire the better, like the back of a romance book. _Czechia was the serious hardworking go-getter who always planned for everything in advance! But the one thing she never planned for was… love! Certainly she never would have expected it in the form of stubborn, funny childhood friend Slovakia! None of her calculations add up when it comes to him!_

That's a good one. She should tell Slovaki—damn.

Let the question sink like a pebble, let the water cover it over, let it remain but leave no trace. Pick it up later.

I don't know what I feel.

Only, despite everything: the possibility of having time, and having space.

That's much too much luxury for any nation to expect of course, even at the turn of a millennium. –Immoderate like bubble baths, only here we are! So delightfully Western European, like progress narratives.

I am a story in search of a shape.

At least it no longer looks to be a tragedy. Nor glorious blaze of innocence or hubris nor modern absurdism that may laugh but looks not away: an ashen village, a thousand thousand little slaughters. You say, _This happened, but it was not the end._ The literary historians have found an extra hundred pages at least yet to turn.

Naked and new. What if you could really have a luxurious bubbly restart?

She hasn't kept a diary in decades, only sporadic spurts over a few days off and on that are embarrassing to reread. Those bastards, the last fifty years and Russia, did their best to file her down and if she kept sure it was down to a _sharp point_ like a stiletto it was still down, she still feels herself to be less.

 _But when did I start the second-guessing everything about myself? When did I start comparing myself and yelling I was better to cover the uncertainty in my head? When did I start overreacting to everything Slovakia said—why can't I take a joke, like I used to? (But why, come to that, should I have to?)_

THUNK. A disconcerting noise. Somewhere. In the building. It's probably only the pipes or something. Definitely nothing to worry about. Definitely. This happened yesterday and she'd leapt up to grab a towel.

Her heart races until, eventually, it slows.

There. There's something at least. Step one. Is it twenty-one days to form a habit, or thirty?

You're allowed to miss the man without wanting him to move back in.

I don't know what I feel.

Perhaps, you simply needn't. Like that hippie advice, unless it was Jesus... You're in the bathtub? Then verily I say to you: _be_ in that bathtub. With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

* * *

After an interval of time, Czech Republic runs out the water and lies on her back on the bottom of the empty tub, pulls her feet and knees up in imitation of a beetle. She feels her shoulder blades and tail-bone and—

Hears the rush-roar, dull, of the draining guttering water pipes, and the soft fuzzy popping of the filmy last of the bubbles, and the thump of her own heart.

Looks at the light in the ceiling and the light at the eyelashed edges of her vision and—

Feels her weight, and strength, and bones.

And she thinks about diving and sinking, delving deep. Not having to float for no one.

It's quiet here at the beginning. The stakes are everything.

When things go bump in the night in your newly-empty house, the very bravest and most decisive action is _not_ to get out of the bathtub.

* * *

 **Notes** :

I haven't even written this character before, and I'd be interested to read more of her. My ideas mainly came from looking over her appearances in the comic so far, and there were some interesting aspects...

The character descriptions of her and Slovkia are rather charming but I find it really… interesting that while she's described as serious and hardworking and patient and all, all we almost EVER get to _see_ of her is her being put in kind of classic blushy flustered tsundere moments! While Slovakia… he's supposed to be easygoing and all, comfortably undermining her goodheartedly and laughing – or, actually, maybe he's not at all happy either (and maybe he does liiiike her etc etc) and this is his own insecurity and lack of self-esteem manifesting in this uneven way. He's yelling and joking that it's like she's dominating him – he throws himself into this submissive pose, and she "Please don't suddenly make me sit on you!" – doesn't actually find this very funny.

Basically I have no idea if I could ship them or what (or who anyone ships them with? or if people see them as siblings!? where's the fic!?). But I do like both of them, and I guess what I'm currently thinking is that from what we see here they do need to experience life on their own … they can't – certainly she can't – approach it neutrally as is. Like, that romance book description could point at TRU LOVE or literally…not. She could be feeling stressed out, _compounded_ by the fact that's she's being told _this is what Romance_ looks like.—stressed out _whether or not_ there's a possibility it could be in her case.. She used to be the archetypal insufferable older child, knows they're right, wants to show the other kids how to do things, okay—and how did we get to her being constantly on _edge_ like this and Slovakia saying she's now cute!? (…I mean - to an extent anyway - uh I'm saying sexism is what I'm saying, societal misogyny, everyone's picked up on expectations of her as, whatever, feminine, and it's added all this awkwardness.)

Other inspirations? she canonically kept diaries and has bubble baths :)

If you read/liked this I'd love your feedback! c: I'm afraid I'm not very active here on fanfiction dot net anymore, but I'm currently trying to get caught up crossposting things for people here! also catch me on the ao3 and tumblr: still-intrepid


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